The Talented Miss Highsmith

by Joan Schenkar

  Tabea Blumenschein was the star of experimental director Ulrike Ottinger’s new film, Madame X, and she had been Ottinger’s live-in lover for the last seven years. Pat’s feelings for Tabea, kindled on a previous trip to Berlin, flared up now at the festival, although Pat was still involved in her three-year-long relationship with the French novelist and translator Marion Aboudaram.

  Tabea—deploying equal amounts of makeup and flair—liked to get herself up as both a louche boy and a flamboyant woman. As a boy, she was dark and sneering, with a disreputable mustache and an ear loop. Dressed as a woman, she was a glamorously assertive blonde whose S&M accoutrements were part of her impersonation.

  An enthusiastic participant in the sexual, social, and artistic experiments with which Berlin’s (and New York’s and Paris’s and London’s) art world amused itself in the late 1970s (“T. spoke often of the Berlin discos, the one-night-stands,” Pat wrote),32 Tabea was also an eclectic maker of art: she designed costumes, she painted and drew, she acted in films. Without her makeup—there is a pale photograph of her with an unadorned face, plump and puppyish and blinking into the sun—Tabea seems hardly to exist. Her face paint, her disco nights, and her elaborate rotations of dress and disguise and transformation were all raw materials for her fresh identities. It was half performance art, half character armor, and wholly fun for a twenty-five-year-old caught up in Berlin nightlife. If, that is, you didn’t think too deeply about what those impostures might be concealing.

  Pat always thought deeply about impostures and concealment, but for a woman like her—a woman in late middle age, profoundly repetitive in her habits, writing characters who were themselves obsessed with transformation—Tabea’s quick-change artistry and avant-garde glamour arrived as a coup de foudre.

  “Pat,” says Tabea Blumenschein,

  never had friends like me. Her women friends were always dressed the same, she never saw anyone change costume and appearance like me. She was excited by my changing of my appearance, she was always asking what I was wearing in letters.33

  Pat’s courting habits, always a little unusual, were, with Tabea, strongly marked by her fetishes. As though she couldn’t quite distinguish between herself and Tabea (whose behavior in Berlin in the 1970s resembled Pat’s behavior in Manhattan in the 1940s), Pat often doubled the presents she bought for Tabea, purchasing one item for the young woman and a twin item for herself.

  Amongst her gifts to Tabea were a “flick knife,” a wristwatch with a black face and no numerals, an odd mirror, and striped shirts that she insisted on calling “sailor clothes.” (They both liked sailors: Pat was first attracted to Tabea because she appeared as a sailor in a campy sailor film by Ulrike Ottinger, and Tabea, in the present day, still paints jaunty pictures of sailors.) Pat bought a mysterious object for which she paid “3 pounds liquid” and which she described to a perplexed Christopher Petit as a “Filthy Paperclip.” This object, mailed out to both Pat and Tabea with the label “Toy Airplane” on it, might have been an erotic toy, but Pat’s reference to it was so coy that its purpose was entirely obscured.

  Despite her dislike of sex on film, Pat had always warmed to dirty jokes, filthy limericks (she was the author of many an unprintable verse), and vulgar descriptions. She liked to refer to the third French village she lived in, Montmachoux, as “Mount-my-shoe,” thus neatly connecting her distaste for the habits of dogs to a slur on her surroundings, and she always found verbal and visual jokes involving human sexual parts and bathroom habits hilarious. She happily described to friends a joke photograph she kept of a woman with one naked breast caught in a washing machine mangle (the photograph is excruciating to look at), captioned: “You think you’ve got problems?”

  In the book she’s writing now, her “4th Ripley,” Pat imagines Tom Ripley toying with the idea of acquiring the ultimate dirty joke: an inflatable doll wife and an inflatable doll mistress. Ripley, whose sexual instincts are perhaps most clearly expressed by his later bedtime readings of Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood and Richard Ellmann’s biography of Oscar Wilde (Pat’s own bedtime reading), decides what Pat herself might have decided under the circumstances: that the rubber sex dolls are as threatening to him as “real” women are. “It would take all the breath out of a man” to blow those dolls up, Ripley thinks.34

  In her most recently published work, Edith’s Diary (1977), Pat made Edith’s son Cliffie, a character so unattractive that readers can feel the motives she had in creating him (Cliffie was suggested by a boy of whom Pat was both jealous and scornful; a boy she later compared to the cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer), fantasize about creating a doppelgänger of the woman who obsesses him. But what will he use? “The problem of the materials threw him off.”35 Pat’s male characters can rarely be bothered to have sex of any kind.

  During her thirteen days in Berlin, Pat’s courting habits followed the rules of revulsion as closely as they obeyed the laws of attraction. Her most inspired idea for a romantic outing with a woman thirty-two years her junior was to take Tabea Blumenschein to a place made memorable by the courting rituals of another species—the crocodile pen at the Berlin zoo.*

  “I shall remember the zoo, with its crocodiles, and Tabea leaning on a rail, on the left, gazing down into their heated pond. She remarked that they had wounded each other by their biting. True. The blood was visible.”36

  Blood was usually “visible” when the talented Miss Highsmith fell in love. But from the onset of every love affair she was convinced that the blood would be her own. When Pat was Tabea’s age, she was phrasing love as something that would empty the blood from her body.

  “Tonight I want to rid myself forever of love, tear it out of me as I would a tick sucking my blood.”37

  Pat burned, suffered, and died in love—and so, if they returned her feelings, did the women who loved her. Lynn Roth—her affair of a few separated weeks in 1953 and 1954—was someone whose pervasive influence she would compare to Tabea’s. For now, the battered veteran of many love wars, Pat was confining herself to liquids and modest hopes: “To laugh and have a beer with [Tabea]—that seems all I want in life just now.”

  So she drinks floods of beer and visits the aquarium with Tabea (“her favorite,” Pat says), as well as those attractively bleeding crocodiles in their hot-water bath. Berlin’s distinctively double nature—two cities with opposing, “entirely artificial” governments, and it’s worth your life to breach the Wall that separates them—is newly attractive to Pat. And Berlin’s S&M nightlife, and the gratuitous sexual transformations of the artists who assist in it, cannot help but appeal to a writer who declared at the age of twenty: “We love either to dominate or to be mastered ourselves…. there is no love without some element of hate,” “nor a love without domination.”38

  Unchanged in her inclinations since she first voiced those opinions, and an old if still somewhat naïve hand in these matters by now, Pat assessed Tabea as a girl who “need[s] a boss.” Tabea herself says: “I felt I couldn’t live in Berlin alone…. I was so young…. I couldn’t live [alone] like Pat was living.”39

  No one could live “like Pat was living” for long, not even Pat herself. Falling in love with Tabea was a catastrophe for her. Pat’s lover Marion Aboudaram witnessed the damage when Pat finally returned to Moncourt from Berlin and London:

  Pat’s eyes were completely closed, she was trembling, she had drunk so much. All the time I gave her vitamins. All she did was drink milk and beer and eat oranges. Tabea and I both had blue-gray eyes and when she looked at mine, she almost swooned.40

  On 11 April, Pat wrote a plain little poem to Tabea to show just where this love was leading her. Pat was feeling the “strange impulse or desire”

  To throw myself into the nearest

  Body of deep water,

  And drown.

  I am not trying to prove

  Anything to anybody.

  This isn’t blackmail.

  I’d do it with a smile.41

  Al
though she adored boats, fantasized many times about being a sailor, and ended the lives of several of her characters in “deep water,” Pat had always feared dying in water. “[T]he thought of drowning is very unpleasant to me,” she told a British journalist in 1987. Naturally, she hid this true fact from her interviewer (Duncan Fallowell) in a haze of misdirection; telling him that her health was “excellent” and that her only illness had been “five cases of the flu.” This, after a life of racking hypochondria, serious blood diseases (chronic anemia and clotting deficiencies), grave arterial maladies (Buerger’s disease), terrible problems with her teeth, and a very recent (1986) operation for lung cancer. She also left out the alcoholism, the anorexia, and the depression.42

  It’s 4 April, now, the morning of her interview with Chris Petit, the young journalist she met in Berlin. Pat left the film festival three days ago to go directly to London, bypassing her house in Moncourt. She writes that she is still “spinning” from the experience of spending time with Tabea Blumenschein. In London, Pat is staying once again at the Islington home of Barbara Ker-Seymer, the highly regarded avant-garde photographer of the 1920s and 1930s (when the avant-garde was still en avant), and Ker-Seymer’s companion, Barbara Roett. The two Barbaras met Pat in the 1960s at the Cagnes-sur-Mer home of Annie Duveen, a lesbian relation of the art authority Sir Joseph Duveen. Annie Duveen, Barbara Roett says, “was terrified of Pat and didn’t know why she was being swooped down on”: Pat could be as unsettling a houseguest as she was a hostess. But the Barbaras are as aware of Pat’s eccentricities as they are sympathetic to the volatility of her current state—which has yet to involve (as did the last “crush” Pat brought to their house, the young journalist Madeleine Harmsworth) reservoir-sized applications of alcohol, faked telephone calls, and the slamming of interior doors.43

  Chris Petit arrived in Islington to the crescent street where the Barbaras lived “early in the morning”—it was 11:00 A.M.—to find Pat already (or still) drinking beer. Right away they discovered a shared taste: “we both smoked the same untipped French cigarettes and she was impressed because I had some Boyars.”

  But Chris “found her sufficiently intimidating to make questions almost impossible to ask,” and Pat gave him a “rotten interview.” The talk was, he says, “of no consequence” except at the very end when Pat unexpectedly answered a question he put to her about her authorship of The Price of Salt, the pseudonymous “lesbian” novel she had never publicly claimed.

  Pat had always been anxious about being identified with The Price of Salt, and she “stewed”—her word—terribly before and after publishing it. (See “Les Girls: Part 1.”) By now, she regularly denigrated the book, attacked her mother for revealing her as the author (Mary Highsmith had spilled the beans to her minister in Texas), and only with the greatest reluctance allowed it to be brought out under her own name in England in 1990. She had had some nervous exchanges in 1985 with Alain Oulman, her editor at Calmann-Lévy in Paris, about the security of her nom de plume Claire Morgan, fearful that her authorship of the work had been leaked in France. (It hadn’t, but the critics found “a Highsmith touch” in the book.)44 When Bloomsbury finally republished Salt in London in 1990 with the name “Patricia Highsmith” on the front cover, they altered the title of the novel to Carol. Some part of The Price of Salt always seemed to be in disguise.

  The likely reason for Pat’s anxiety about the novel is the one she admitted to when she was writing it. She couldn’t bear the exposure. She also couldn’t resist the temptation of creating the work as a double forgery: in the novel she is both pseudonymous (she published under the name of Claire Morgan) and eponymous (she created the character of Therese from her own experience).

  The Price of Salt, written in the richly figured language of pursuit, betrayal, and murder, trails elements of crime fiction but is most redolent of fairy tale. Its line of force, in Susannah Clapp’s felicitous phrase, is “a detection of the heart,” 45 and its central criminal act—homosexual love—is the only one the outlaw heroines get away with.

  Salt’s beginnings in the toy section of a department store are filled with crude salesgirls who surround the precocious, artistic Therese like “a pack of wolves” 46—a phrase Pat used in her notebook to describe her fellow coworkers at Bloomingdale’s department store during her cameo appearance there as a salesgirl in December of 1948. (See “Les Girls: Part 1.”) In a reimagining of what had actually happened to her, Pat makes one of the “wolves” steal the “bloody bag of meat” young Therese is saving for her dinner. (Pat’s contempt for working-class women is palpable in this book.) Therese is dressed ritually like a “doll” in a hand-stitched bloodred dress by a gnomelike coworker who tries to mother her. Later on, Therese is redressed in a snow-white gown—again she looks like a “doll”—by another mother: her soon-to-be-disappointed prospective mother-in-law. Therese is symbolically wounded (a cut on her leg which she staunches with Kotex) just before meeting Carol, the older Ice Queen, who steals her heart, spirits her away to a kind of castle in the suburbs, feeds her a milky potion (in which Therese can taste blood and bone), asks her three important questions, and then grooms her for a long connubial voyage across the United States in a car.

  Therese is courted by several men and another woman, undergoes serious tests of moral courage, and is awarded every single thing her heart desires—including Carol, the Ice Queen, who gives up her daughter for Therese. (And how Pat must have enjoyed writing that.) Therese’s final reward is Pat’s own American Dream, slightly transmuted: a really good chance at becoming a famous stage designer and a large apartment on Madison Avenue with her much older lover.

  Because The Price of Salt is a Highsmith fairy tale, there are a few irregularities. The two heroines prefer each other to any of their attendant males (or females). The seesaw of their love balances itself on dominance and submission and teeters, refreshingly, back and forth between the two women. The power to say no (always stronger in Highsmith novels than the power to say yes) is slyly applied like an unexpected thumb to a grocer’s scale. Blood is in the corner of every smile, and sexual consummations are spied upon, recorded, and offered up as legal threats. The beautiful Carol keeps a gun in the glove box of her automobile. The odor of mother-daughter incest is everywhere.

  Carol and Therese’s cross-country motor flight from a shadowy male pursuer is the centerpiece of The Price of Salt—just as the months-long motor trip of Vladimir Nabokov’s brilliant hallucination, Lolita, is the spine which compresses the nerves of that novel—and their drive begins, as does Humbert’s with his Lo, as an unacknowledged and incestuous honeymoon. Throughout the book, Carol and Therese enact a parody of mother-daughter relations which, in its quieter way, is almost as unsettling as Humbert and Lolita’s awful caricature of father-daughter love.

  The Price of Salt is far less conventional in its distribution of justice than Nabokov’s tour de force. Nabokov’s characters all get what the mid-1950s thought they “deserved” for their behavior—an early and agonizing death, mostly, and no profit from their transgressive pleasures. (Only the reader is allowed to profit from Nabokov’s gorgeous prose.)

  But The Price of Salt, published three years before Lolita appeared, is a homosexual love story with an almost happy ending and not, as Pat wrote in the 1990 preface to the edition bearing her name, what the literary code of the time required: a novel with an ending in which the characters “pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality.” 47 And its pseudonymous, eponymous author actually fell in love with the character of Carol and with Carol’s relationship to Therese as she was writing about them—a far more subtle and artistic response than falling in love with Mrs. E. R. Senn, the well-dressed bourgeoise whose chance meeting with Pat was the “germ” of The Price of Salt.48 (See “Les Girls:” Part 1.)*

  But on this spring morning in 1978, says Christopher Petit, Pat “did admit to me at the end that she had written
The Price of Salt.” And then she made “me promise for about 15 minutes that I wouldn’t mention it in the interview or attribute it to her.”

  Chris Petit thinks Pat made this unusual declaration “because I’d plied her with cigarettes” and “laid it on” about her work. A year or two ago, he’d managed to get hold of a xeroxed copy of her Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction—“It’s not easy to find,” Pat responded, grasping the fact that only a real Highsmith fan would go to that length to read her work—and Petit brought to the interview an American first edition of Strangers on a Train for her to sign.

  “And that basically was the end of that,” says Mr. Petit, except for “some [of her] pretty wacky political views…. Until the question of the dictionary came up.”

  They were talking about Berlin and Petit remarked that “visiting East Berlin is less of a cultural shock” than going to London.49 Always happy to identify a flaw in any country she’d left behind (Pat had moved from England to France ten years before), Pat thought “that was the funniest remark I’d heard in a week. The people in London streets do look scruffy, shabby, unwashed even…. Even Regent Street begins to look like Oxford Street.”50

  Chris, who had met Tabea through the film circles he frequented, mentioned that he was going back to Berlin shortly. And then it was Pat’s turn to pose a question: “In that case,” she said, “perhaps you can do me a favor.”